ARTLAB RESIDENCY 2024
Small Things
September 5 – October 5, 2024
Artists
Maude Arès & Douglas Scholes
Curator
Noémie Fortin
Overview
As part of the ArtLab 2023-24 residency, curator Noémie Fortin brings together the artistic worlds of Maude Arès and Douglas Scholes. With the complicity of RURART, an organization working in the fields of art and agriculture, their encounter takes root in the Eastern Townships countryside. The artists are invited to immerse themselves in the rhythm of the seasons as they pass by La Généreuse farm, each in their own way making gestures of accumulation and maintenance.
Scholes focuses on the seemingly trivial: ordinary, sometimes neglected objects, pragmatic actions and the everyday. Wandering through museum and private collections, junkyards, roadsides and waterways, he finds in scraps and abandoned objects an inexhaustible source of wonder. For her part, Arès pays particular attention to the different states of matter. Adopting a posture of sensitive observation, she engages in a poetic relationship with the world, with material fragments, twigs and bits of string, found objects and the carefully crafted mystery-tools she keeps in her collection of cases.
At the crossroads of their practices lies an interest in small things: those found by chance, gleaned from the street, encountered in collections, picked here and there, those that are cared for, maintained, patched and patched up, those that seem banal, that escape our gaze, but which inhabit us, those that are precious, filled with memories, and which carry within them great emotional charges. Throughout the year, their stays at the farm will enable them to explore the potential for activating what is there, on the land that has seen the germination of many family, agricultural, artistic, nurturing and educational projects. An exhibition collecting the traces of the residency will be presented at the Foreman Art Gallery in autumn 2024.
Artists
Maude Arès is an interdisciplinary artist, who works in installation, sculpture, performance, set design and drawing. In her practice, she explores the sensory relationships between various found materials. By combining and configuring these materials in different ways, her artworks become the stage for vulnerable environments that invite us to pay close attention to the subtilities of the tangible world around us. She channels her reflections on the performativity of materials and the actions that give them life via projects that bring together the visual and performative arts. Through attentiveness to the energy and activity of the physical world, she observes the visible and invisible relationships of interdependency that connect humans and non-humans.
Arès’ individual and collective projects have been presented in Quebec and Colombia at artist-run centres and theatres (Théâtre La Chapelle, B-312, Tangente, Théâtre Aux Écuries, Galerie de l’UQAM, Campos de Gutiérrez, Circa, Phi Foundation for Contemporary Art), and in the context of various events (OFFTA, Nuit Blanche à Montréal, ORANGE – L’événement d’art actuel de Sainte-Hyacinthe, Chromatic, OUF! – Festival Off Casteliers).
Douglas Scholes incorporates the opportunities levied by the academies of the University of Lethbridge (BFA, 1999) and l’Université du Québec à Montréal (MFA, 2001) and the grant-giving institutions of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec. His performances and installations include photographs, videos, sculptures derived from a sustained exploration into the pragmatic aesthetic (the way things are now) through artists residencies and exhibitions in Canada, the USA and Europe. Most notably, his work has been shown at DARE DARE (Montreal, 2004 & 2011), Art Gallery of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 2019), Sporobole (Sherbrooke, 2018), LandMarks2017 with Partners in Art and Parks Canada (Montreal, 2017), Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge, 2015), Space Studios, international residency (London, 2012), Le 3e Impérial (Granby, 2010-2011), La Maison Laurentine (France, 2011), DARE DARE and The Imagination Station (Detroit, 2011). Scholes is represented by Robertson Arès Gallery in Montreal.
Curator
Originally from Lac-Mégantic, Noémie Fortin is an independent curator, writer and cultural worker based in the Eastern Townships. She and her family live on the traditional and unceded territory of the W8banaki Nation, the Ndakina, where she is involved in artistic, agricultural and community projects and processes focused on caring for living things. Attuned to forms and practices grounded in an ecofeminist approach, her research focuses on ecological art that moves out of the institution to engage directly with territories and communities, particularly in rural areas. Since 2017, her curatorial projects have been presented at the Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, at 3e impérial centre d’essai en art actuel, and at RURART art contemporain en milieu rural. Her writing has featured in a number of specialized publications, including Esse arts + opinion, Vie des arts and The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada.
